


The Overlook Hotel, After the Show

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Akudama Drive (Anime)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Fluff, Fluff and Existentialism, Gen, Healing, I really don't have a good excuse for this but I had a lot of fun with it, Meta, Metafiction, Post-Canon, Spoilers, The Shining References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28005708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Swindler and her Akudama costars stay for a while at the Overlook Hotel -- (yes, from "The Shining") -- as part of a metatextual tour of their anime's influences.  Apparently, their creators paid extra to get them this opportunity.  Huh.  Go figure.Also, Cutthroat plays in the snow!
Relationships: Cutthroat & Ordinary | Swindler (Akudama Drive)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	The Overlook Hotel, After the Show

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there~ Um.... like I said in the tags, I don't really have a good excuse for this one ahahaha. I'd originally just meant to write a hypothetical first line, but then I had a little fic!!! I hope you enjoy it, if you read. Sorry for any and all mistakes I might've made. <\-- As an edit, I noticed a PRETTY HUGE error recently (namely that I've been calling this place the "Stanley," when it shoulda been the "Overlook".... the Stanley inspired the Overlook, but like. GEEZ, embarrassing........... I'm sorry, universe. I considered just taking this story down, truth be told, but for now I'm just editing it????)
> 
> Metafiction influences include "Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me," Homestuck and Wreck-It Ralph. :P -- AHHH and I forgot! Also, "Inkheart." Definitely "Inkheart." Special thanks to Jericho_Pryce for double-checking my "The Shining" references here. 
> 
> Thank you!!! I hope you're staying safe and having an excellent day.

Outside the Overlook Hotel, in America, an entire ocean away from the infamous Akudama List... from the divine and electrically rattling Shinkansen, from that dull flickery weapons storage room or whatever the hell it was where the woman who was now called “Swindler” had watched Cutthroat bleed out into the tile... snow was falling. Snow had buried the old Colorado mountain, and just like in the Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick/world-before-the-war-that-transformed-Kansai movie _The Shining_ , it would be stupidly dangerous to try driving down the steep roads and back into the city, now.

This hotel was all sweet plush chairs and velvety carpets, glittery chandeliers and snickering shadows. Swindler and the other six main character-Akudama were the only breathing souls here in the hotel, now, and they would be guarding this place until spring. Again, yeah, just like in _The Shining_. It was all part of a post-series meta tour of their anime’s influences, or something bizarre like that. Apparently, Swindler’s creators had paid extra to get them this opportunity, but hadn’t been willing to splurge on first or last names for anybody. Don’t worry. Just go with it. 

Swindler brought a cup of steaming, honeyed tea to her lips, watching snowflakes somersault dizzily out the window. She resisted the urge to call that babysitter she’d hired for Sister and Brother again to check up on them. The babysitter was somebody from a fairly well-known non-horror anime — _Fruits Basket_ , if Swindler remembered right? — and she’d been willing to work for money from Swindler’s anime universe instead of her own, which was apparently very generous. 

The hedge maze outside the Overlook Hotel: that’s where Jack Torrance died in the movie _The Shining_ , frozen stiff with a rictus smile on and an ax balanced on his legs. He’d been hunting his family, at the time, and... Swindler knew, now... his rage and laughing chase had inspired one of the especially nasty things that’d happened to her. The way Cutthroat dragged his seeping broken leg behind him as he’d followed her through the halls... the way he’d crunched, grinning like death through the door, ready to rip her apart with his hands. 

_Here’s Johnny!_ That’s what Jack Torrance famously snarled, at that point in the movie, when he splintered through his own door. _Here’s Cutthroat!_ Even down to the way Cutthroat had pleaded with Swindler for forgiveness, wheedling lies outside a locked room, trying to get at her, voice dripping with hungry sweetness. There had been some of Hollywood’s Jack Torrance in him then, too, and when he learned the truth of it he’d gone very still. His eyes had seemed staring and hollow as switched-off TV screens. He’d waited for a cold second, maybe seeing what Swindler was gonna do next, and then murmured, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, huh?” into the air. That was something else of Jack Torrance’s, that line. Did Cutthroat remember something like it from before he became what he was, now? Had he been a novelist, like Jack Torrance? An artist, maybe? Cutthroat said there were bloody halos hanging in the air, for him — and why had their creators decided to hand him such painful symbolism? Jack Torrance had been twisted by a ruinous, poisoned place. This place. The Overlook Hotel, where Swindler was singing her tongue on a fancy cup of tea right this second. 

_“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”_

It was true that Cutthroat seemed to really enjoy “play,” and it was difficult to imagine him wanting to meet a lot of writing deadlines. Swindler had been watching him build all their “friends”/anime costars out of snow over by Jack Torrance’s hedge maze for a while now, running around to collect pine needles and icy rocks to decorate his creations with. He had made her a smile out of twigs, for example, and he’d hung his red-and-white striped scarf around his own snowman-self’s neck. Swindler had shoved that scarf into Cutthroat’s arms before he darted outside, actually; it wasn’t like the guy was wearing a winter coat, or anything. Maybe it should’ve made her angry, but now that the first season of their show was over and Swindler had gotten a peek at their creators’ inspiration vis a vis everybody’s character arcs, she felt surprisingly protective of her fellow Akudama. Yes, including Cutthroat. He’d been written to try and murder her just like he’d been drawn with pale smooth hair and designed to eat marshmallows by the handful even when Swindler was passing out protein bars to make sure everyone could get through their _Reservoir Dogs_ -themed walking tour. It was like he was supposed to be a jumpscare of a man – killed for a movie reference, living without a solid history — and all she really knew was that hundreds of people had tuned in for his execution. It was a tragedy, in a way. They were all characters in a rollicking cyberpunk tragedy, and so they were a tragedy, too. 

Cutthroat hadn’t chosen his story — for all Swindler knew, he would’ve rather been written into a romantic comedy. Or maybe a space opera? He could go visit Mars, the _red_ planet, then... who knows. Just like Hacker probably wouldn’t have wanted to be so perpetually bored, and Courier might have written himself a lot of much less dramatic jobs if he’d gotten a say. Did Cutthroat still dream about murder, now that he’d reached the end of his scripted life? Swindler knew she wasn’t the only anime character worrying about her series’s antagonists — apparently there were support groups for this sort of thing: the girl from _Fruits Basket_ had slipped her a business card — but it was hard to think she’d ever get used to it. Hard to imagine she could ever run out of questions. 

Cutthroat still called Swindler his “Angel,” you know, even now that she’d killed him in self-defense. That was... hm. He called her his “Angel,” and when some of these rogue vampire extras from the anime _Hellsing_ had tried to steal a little of her blood he’d torn them to gloppy screaming tatters. They’d regenerated, like undead things tended to do; he’d butchered them again. By the end of it all, Doctor had needed to attach part of Cutthroat’s face back on, and one of his ears, too — his shoulders had been shaking with silent laughter the whole time. 

“Don’t be so reckless!” Swindler had told him, once he could hear her again. “Unless we get a season two, they might actually kill you!”

“Eh. He’s going to be in the manga adaptation,” Doctor mused, flicking some of Cutthroat’s blood off her wrist. “If he wants to play with vampires, I don’t know why we should stop him.”

“It probably still hurts,” Swindler protested, and, “It does, it does,” Cutthroat assured her. “I’m sorry, my Angel, but I’d do it again, too.”

“Not because you’re waiting for the perfect time to kill me again, right?” Swindler found herself asking. But would she have even believed Cutthroat, whatever he said next? Maybe it was better that he didn’t answer. Just looked down at the blood congealing on his hands, like he was trying to decide on the right response to that, himself. He looked kind of existentially horrified, Swindler thought. Like he was trying to read the footnotes to his own existence. Like he knew his scripted lines could start up again at any time, and he might not even realize it.

It was weird, being a character. So far as Swindler knew, she was “real,” but she wasn’t her own. What would Cutthroat choose to be, if he could write his own story? What would _Swindler_ have chosen to be? Was it too late to think about any of that, the second a drop of ink hit the metaphorical page?

Cutthroat waved at Swindler from down by poor wicked Jack Torrance’s hedge maze — a wide-swinging, playful arm up over his head. She jumped. She... hadn’t realized he could see her through the window, honestly. She tipped her teacup to him, awkwardly, and maybe he took that as the question “Do you want some tea?” because he called “Okay!” and shivered. Started trooping dutifully inside.

Cutthroat’s fingers would be all numb with cold, for sure. Swindler _had_ made this pot of tea so very, very sweet, thinking that might be how her anime’s resident _The Shining_ reference would like it best.

**Author's Note:**

> (PS -- I think it's really neat symbolism that all the Akudama Drive characters are known by titles only..... lots of interesting stuff to be read into that...... the bit about the creators not paying to register names for them here is 100000% a joke.)


End file.
